Messaging · Brand Strategy · Proprietary 360° Product Capture
Independent Jeweler · Houston, TX · 2016
In 2016 Brian Vaughn walked in with a reference video he loved: a sharp, irreverent, Dollar-Shave-Club-style brand launch spot. Funny. Punchy. Everywhere at the time. And completely, fundamentally off-brand for a family jewelry shop built on craftsmanship, trust, and the weight of the moments people buy diamonds for.
Before we shot a frame, we spent weeks on the inside of the business. Not a creative brief — an excavation. Who Wolf Diamonds was. Who their customers were. What they actually did differently. What Brian sounded like when he stopped performing and started telling the truth.
Out of that work came three brand value proposition pieces that captured Wolf Diamonds in its own voice — not a borrowed voice from a razor startup in a warehouse. And out of the same process came something neither of us walked in planning: a proprietary in-house 360° product capture program we called SpinHouse.
“The thing I love about Taylor is he spent weeks here at Wolf Diamonds understanding who we are, what drives us, what motivates us, who our customers were, and how to reach them in the most efficient way we could.”Tim Langolf · Wolf Diamonds
The Judgment Call
The Dollar Shave Club launch video was the reference everyone wanted in 2016. Cheeky. Viral. Founder-on-camera cracking wise. It worked because the brand was a razor startup selling against a tired category — and humor was the differentiation strategy.
Wolf Diamonds sits in the exact opposite position. Independent jeweler. Serious moments — engagements, anniversaries, heirlooms. Customers who walk in wanting to be taken seriously, not winked at. Borrowing a viral razor brand’s humor would have made Wolf Diamonds feel cheap the moment the camera cut. I told Brian no. Then I showed him why.
The project wasn’t making a better version of the funny video. It was building the brand platform that would make the right three videos obvious.
The Deliverable
Out of the Clarity Sprint came three durable brand value propositions — the ones Brian’s team could stand behind in a showroom conversation, a social post, or a thirty-second ad and sound exactly like themselves every time.
The difference between a piece Wolf Diamonds makes and a piece pulled from a mall case — and why that difference shows up on a hand every morning for fifty years.
Independent doesn’t mean small. It means the customer gets the owner’s judgment, not a commissioned clerk’s upsell — on the biggest purchase most people make outside a house.
Diamonds aren’t the purchase. The engagement, the anniversary, the story the ring gets told inside of — that’s the purchase. Wolf Diamonds builds for the story, not the stone.
The Invention · SpinHouse
Online jewelry in 2016 was still trapped in flat, front-facing stills that didn’t do justice to the actual stone. Customers couldn’t see how a ring caught light, how the band sat at different angles, how the cut behaved in motion — the things that matter most about a diamond in person.
I built a 360° image-and-video capture rig inside Wolf Diamonds — a programmed turntable setup with controlled lighting and a repeatable process that could photograph and spin-video any piece in the inventory to a consistent spec. We called it SpinHouse. It wasn’t a one-time shoot. It was an ongoing program Brian’s team could run themselves every time a new piece came in the door.
Four years later, during COVID in 2020, the same capture methodology became the spine of the Adaptive Solar site — reapplied to a totally different product category when physical showrooms shut down. That is what a good idea does. It doesn’t stay in one case study.
“The day we decided to shoot, he came in set up and ready to go — extremely professional, knew exactly what to do, used the time wisely. But the thing that impressed us most was the final product. It absolutely blew our minds.”Tim Langolf · Wolf Diamonds
Letter of Recommendation · Brian Vaughn
case-studies-assets/wolf-diamonds/brian-vaughn-letter.pdf (or .txt)The Follow-Through · XTech
The Wolf Diamonds work is where my relationship with Brian Vaughn started. Years later, when he stood up a crude oil shipping venture — XTech — we ran the same messaging playbook at a very different scale.
Clarity sprint, positioning, pitch material, investor-ready story. The same through-line that delivered three pillars for a Houston jewelry shop, delivered a funded oil and gas venture.
$3.5M raisedSee the XTech case study for the full raise story. (NDA-restricted assets; teaser and stills only.)
In Their Words
“Taylor is very clear and direct in what he wants. He created a storyboard for exactly what we wanted on the day of our shoot. He was very knowledgeable — knew exactly how to communicate to us, tell us where to move, tell us where to go.” Tim Langolf · on direction
“The videos of how he portrayed this business were perfect. It reflected us in a one-minute video, and it was exactly what we wanted to talk about.” Tim Langolf · on the final cut